Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Firefox 2.0 released

Last week, Microsoft released the new Internet Explorer 7.0. Today it is the release of Mozilla Firefox 2.0. Which one to choose? Well, for me it's Firefox for sure. For one thing, I still run windows 2000 at work.(IE 7 does not support windows 2000). More importantly, IE 7 introduces many security enhancements in the new product, which I will be among the last to try, given Microsoft's record on security. Coming to Firefox 2, there are no big changes that you were not available as addons in the earlier version. I still hate the fact that it uses up so much memory. Agreed that I have a few addons (greasemonkey, NoScript, Firebug, and web developer toolbar), but still the startup memory consumption in firefox is 25MB without addons and about 35MB with addons. As you can see in the picture below, my regular usage goes up to 246MB regularly. I never saw anything like that with IE 6, even with over over 10 windows open at a time (about the same number of tabs were open in firefox when I took the snapshot. In any case, I am sticking to Firefox for now (so used to it!).